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William Buckland was a man whose passion for geology and palaeontology was matched only by the voracity of his stomach.  As eccentric as his character was, what passed his lips was much more bizarre.

Together with his son Francis, who had an equally liberal palate, Buckland viewed Noah’s Ark as a dinner menu as he entertained guests at their home with exotic meals of things like hedgehogs, roast ostrich, porpoise, crocodile steaks and even cooked puppies.

It’s unclear why William adopted such an unusual diet. Most likely, it was a mix of fame and curiosity. Although his father was educated, their family lived modestly until he was admitted to Corpus Christi College, a small but prestigious Oxford college, through sheer luck and hard work.

Being short on funds as a young professor at Oxford, he used racy jokes and profanity to entice fee-paying students to attend his lectures. Many think it was around this time that William started taking a fork and knife to the animal kingdom, simply to feed his notoriety by becoming a weird zoophage.

William especially had a fondness for mice served on toast and said moles were the vilest dish he had ever eaten until he chewed on the bluebottle fly. His house was stuffed to the brim with bones and fossils and pets like guinea pigs, at least one pony, snakes, frogs, ferrets, hawks, owls, cats, and dogs, while a pet hyena named Billy ran amock. Outside, the children often liked to stand on a large pet tortoise while foxes and chickens ran about.

To cap the madness off, Buckland was reported to have unintentionally consumed a portion of the mummified heart of King Louis XIV.

While dining out one evening at Lord Harcourt’s residence at Nuneham in 1848 he was shown a silver locket containing an object resembling pumice stone. He popped the object in his mouth, perhaps to try and find out what mineral it was, and swallowed it. It was however part of the mummified heart of Louis XIV of France which had been nicked from the royal tomb by a member of the Harcourt family. 

Despite being such a cartoonish figure, Buckland wrote the first full account of a fossil dinosaur, which he named Megalosaurus, and pioneered the use of fossilised faeces in reconstructing ecosystems, coining the term coprolites.

He also became Dean of Westminster, excavated one of the oldest human remains ever found and was awarded the Copley Medal for proving how scientific analysis could reconstruct events in the distant past. On top of these accolades, he also has a ridge on the Moon named after him – Dorsum Buckland.

Though Buckland took Genesis 9:3 (“Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you.”) a bit too literal, he remains a respected scientist in his field.

We just can’t get over the mice toasties.

[source:atlasobscura]